[New Blog Post] The clothesline challenge

[Robert Orzanna]

by Ashley Colby August 4, 2020

https://scorai.org/the-clothesline-challenge/

I’d like to introduce you to an exciting technology, one that can disrupt our dependence on fossil fuels by using entirely clean energy to provide for some of the most basic needs of humanity. All humans need shelter from temperature extremes, many of which are becoming more extreme in the era of climate change. This technology harnesses the most powerful source of energy on Earth through ambient airflow to change an abundant chemical from one state of matter to another, and results in a material that can provide comfort and protection to humans in the era of the anthropocene. If, as an example, the entire city of Chicago adopted the use of this tool, the energy savings would be approximately one million MWh and result in a collective economic savings of $154 million monthly¹. We are hoping for widespread adoption of this innovative tool, which would cause a paradigm shift in energy and comfort around the globe.

Of course the technology I am talking about here is the innovative, exciting, paradigm-shifting clothesline. Maybe if this kind of tool was marketed using the language of technologists (as above) it would get funding from the Gates Foundation and would take off as the Next Best Thing. The point of the satire is to illustrate how we fetishize technology-as-savior when many of the most impactful solutions are simple, well-known, and cheap to implement.

To those of you who say to yourselves: “I can’t get involved in activism, I don’t have the time or ability,” I am posing a challenge for you: use only a clothesline to dry all your clothing for one month. Most of you are in summer now. Turn off your dryer and pretend it is broken. No excuses, no cheating, one month. Let’s call it the clothesline challenge.

What I posit is that beyond the energy or cost savings, you might learn something unexpected by doing something differently. First, where do you get the line? Where do you hang it (you must notice where you have access to sunlight and open space)? Do you entirely lack any space to dry? What do people in apartments in cities around the world do to solve this problem? Are you confronted by your neighbors (acting as the police of neoliberalism) telling you it is against your homeowners association to see such a monstrosity? Are you capable of using tools to hang a clothesline or do you sub-contract the manual work of your life to others? What’s it like to go outside to hang clothes as part of your routine of caring for your own needs? What’s it like to be cognizant of the weather? What’s it like to wait until storms pass as the laundry piles up? Do you have backup clothes for this situation? Do you have enough line space? What do you prioritize washing?

After this month, I’d love to hear from you. What did you expect to learn? What did you learn that was unexpected? Did any of your lessons bleed into some non-clothesline aspect of your life? If I hear from enough people to put something together, I’ll write another article in a month reporting on any themes. Let’s get hanging!

You can email the author for feedback at ash...@rizomafieldschool.com

1. Thanks to John Mulrow for these numbers, and the idea. [↩]

[Pericles asher Rospigliosi]

Thanks for this Ashley. I have circulated it among colleagues in Brighton, though here in UK the use of machine drying is not as ubiquitous as your call to action implies. Are you basing your thinking on Uruguay or USA or elsewhere?

[Ashley Colby]

I was thinking of the USA (in Uruguay almost no one I know has a machine dryer). I was aware that there remained many places in Europe where people still hung clothing, but still do not know the exact numbers of the population who do.

Thanks for circulating!

Ashley

Ashley Colby Fitzgerald

ash...@rizomafieldschool.com

PhD, Environmental Sociology

Co-founder Rizoma Field School

Colonia, Uruguay

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[Rees, William]

Are you aware that in many communities, hanging clothes out to dry is a bylaw infraction?  Offends folks' aesthetic sensibilities, apparently.

WER

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From: sco...@googlegroups.com <sco...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Ashley Colby <ash...@rizomafieldschool.com>
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Subject: Re: [SCORAI] Re: [New Blog Post] The clothesline challenge

 

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[Thomas Love]

I just checked with our city administrator (small suburban community outside Portland, OR). I would suspect our situation is similar to most - no city ordinance against clotheslines, it's (as Bill suggests) a HOA bylaw situation. Given the non-prevalence of HOAs, that would seem to mean that clotheslines are permitted in most urban and suburban areas in the US.

Tom 

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[Ashley Colby]

Yes! I included it in my list of questions in the piece:

Are you confronted by your neighbors (acting as the police of neoliberalism) telling you it is against your homeowners association to see such a monstrosity? 

Ashley Colby Fitzgerald

ash...@rizomafieldschool.com

PhD, Environmental Sociology

Co-founder Rizoma Field School

Colonia, Uruguay

[Jean Boucher]

When I was living on Long Island, NY, my landlord wouldn't allow me to put up a clothesline. He said that it was against a town ordinance (I never verified)  - so I figured a way to be sneaky or hang clothes inside - fun fun - Jean

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Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed

until it is faced. – James Baldwin

[Rees, William]

We don't have a municipal ban on clotheslines in Vancouver, but various strata developments (condos) disallow them because the provincial government permits residential buildings to ban clotheslines for aesthetic purposes.

It's a common enough problem according to this ''Sightline Institute" post:

"As we and others have said, hundreds of thousands of people across Cascadia—and tens of millions across the United States—live where homeowners associations (HOAs) (or apartment or condo rules) ban clotheslines. Clotheslines are a quintessentially sustainable tool that saves money, prolongs the lifespan of laundry, and eliminates pollution. A “right-to-dry” movement has sprung up and won laws in six states––Florida, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, and Vermont—to render these bans void and unenforceable. In another 13 states, I have discovered to my surprise and delight, solar access laws already on the books appear to protect solar drying.

Yet in all of these 19 states, illegal bans persist in community rulebooks, such as HOA Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions (CC&Rs), and a number that likely runs into the millions of residents do not know they already have a right to dry. Solar access laws, many of them from the 1970s, and obscure amendments to state property law hardly fall in the category of common knowledge. When Sightline sent out an email alert asking people to let us know about bans where they live, over a third of responses came from inside these 19 states.|"

Humans are weird! 

Bill

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[Thomas Love]

Maybe it doesn't need stating, but I think the real issue about why drying clothes on outside lines fell out of favor is not really laws or HOA regulations against them, but rather because the practice itself fell out of favor for reasons of status group/consumption styles. HOA and anachronistic laws seem to me to be overwhelmingly an effect, not a cause of low use of clotheslines.

It's like riding public transportation. I worked with a few folks to get commuter hour bus service out to the town where I worked, and I rode the bus faithfully for almost a decade. It was much better than driving - cheaper (taxpayer subsidized), safer (bigger vehicle), convivial (we developed quite a community over the years), pyschologically healthy (driving is taxing, so a driver took stress off us), energy efficient, and work efficient (often got work done en route). But it was hard to get many of my colleagues to use the bus. While there were some good reasons, to be sure (inconvenient schedules, irregular/unpredictable work hours, some people preferred carpools or even driving solo to think), I think the biggest obstacle was the widespread attitude that it's "losers" who ride public transit - people who've fallen behind in the status and class competition. 

Same with clotheslines - who uses them? Poor people (= "losers"). 

How to make clotheslines and commuting on public transport sexy? It's these cultural barriers that most stubbornly resist change I think.

Tom 

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From: sco...@googlegroups.com <sco...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Rees, William <wr...@mail.ubc.ca>
Sent: Wednesday, August 5, 2020 12:09
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Subject: Re: [SCORAI] Re: [New Blog Post] The clothesline challenge

 

We don't have a municipal ban on clotheslines in Vancouver, but various strata developments (condos) disallow them because the provincial government permits residential buildings to ban clotheslines for aesthetic purposes.

not

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/scorai/212ce98cbf5942b89855907596ad1f3d%40mail.ubc.ca.

[Jean Boucher]

Yes, to what Tom said, we gotta make it cool and sexy, unfortunately, get us an army of marketing psychologists and a bunch of money to fund them - JB

[Thomas Love]

The greater recession here is going to make it that much harder for people to continue feigning "distance from necessity" as Bourdieu so aptly put it. 

Tom

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Sent: Wednesday, August 5, 2020 19:55
To: Thomas Love <tl...@linfield.edu>
Cc: wr...@mail.ubc.ca <wr...@mail.ubc.ca>; a.rosp...@brighton.ac.uk <a.rosp...@brighton.ac.uk>; ash...@rizomafieldschool.com <ash...@rizomafieldschool.com>; SCORAI <sco...@googlegroups.com>

[Ashley Colby]

I think this is an important insight:

I think the biggest obstacle was the widespread attitude that it's "losers" who ride public transit - people who've fallen behind in the status and class competition.   

I've seen it play out in multiple slow or low tech consumer/producer habits like public transport, growing food, clothes drying, lowered/questioning consumer habits, riding a bicycle, cooking at home, hand washing dishes, hunting, keeping small livestock, etc. 

There is a point in many countries where they've been marketed the idea that poor/backwards people do this thing (in order to get them to consume more). Where I focus my efforts is at the convergence of people who have held onto these practices as a sort of cultural heritage (think of rural/less affluent people around the world) and those more affluent people who come 'back' to these practices as a kind of hip, green thing to do. There is incredible overlap between these two populations, and when they see each other as mutual allies (as in my forthcoming book!) I think it's enough to really cause a tipping point. 

Ashley Colby Fitzgerald

ash...@rizomafieldschool.com

PhD, Environmental Sociology

Co-founder Rizoma Field School

Colonia, Uruguay

[Valentina Aversano-Dearborn]

The discussion about individual eco-gestures -  like hanging clothes instead of using a dryer - reminds me of an interesting study from a few years ago that - back then- sparked an important debate thanks to it's powerful visualization that ranked individual actions for their effectiveness in combating climate change. Here it is: http://www.kimnicholas.com/uploads/2/5/7/6/25766487/fig1full.jpg

The results in a nutshell: While hanging clothes is at the lower end of the impact spectrum, having one less child was mentioned by the study as the most impactful act to reduce individual greenhouse gases. (You can imagine, why this sparked a big debate).

Now, what I find even more interesting is, that a follow-up study from Wynes, Seth, and Kimberly A Nicholas. 2017. “The Climate Mitigation Gap: Education and Government Recommendations Miss the Most Effective Individual Actions.” took those insights and compared those findings to the examples suggested for individual climate action in high school text books and government communication pieces in Canada, the US, Australia and Europe. They found that the studied sources mentioned low-impact actions such as recycling and energy saving light bulbs over high-impact actions such as living meat-, car- or child-free.

While of course every little gesture counts, and posing playful challenges is a great way to motivate people to engage in trying out (or sticking with) new/old sustainable lifestyles, I think this study is a good indicator on where there is a need to put more emphasis in communicating sustainable lifestyles .. especially at a systemic level and at an educational level as "there is evidence that younger generations are willing to depart from current lifestyles in environmentally relevant ways". (see discussion section in the paper)

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Valentina Aversano-Dearborn
ViA: Forum for Sustainable Visions in Action (Forum-ViA)
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[Rees, William]

Good points, Valentina,  but a problem remains -- 

Our neoliberal age transfers responsibility for eco-damage to individuals and disempowers regulatatory agencies, but studies have shown that without adequate sociocultural support and infrastructure, individual action is not very effective.  If I live in a typical North American, Australian or European community, I cannot abandon my car, for example, because there no -- or only  inadequate -- alternatives to intra-urban travel. 

What we have to recognize is that climate change, ocean pollution, land degradation, etc., are all symptoms of systemic cultural overshoot (too many people consuming too much energy/material and dumping too much waste, i.e., using nature beyond ecosystems' regenerative and assimilitive capacities).  

While individual life-style changes can make a marginal difference the heavy lifting cannot be achieved by each of us acting alone.  Neither you nor I can  implement the carbon taxes or cap and trade systems, the resource depletion taxes, full social cost pricing, rapid transit systems, one-child policies, needed for effective reductions in the human eco-footprint.  Even younger people who are "...are willing to depart from current lifestyles in environmentally relevant ways" will find they are unable to do so effectively without widespread sociocultural support.  Unsustainability is a collective problem requiring collective solutions.  Major structural reforms must be implemented by governments for the common good. 

And, of course, we have to acknowledge the reality of steadily increasing atmospheric carbon concentrations and worsening global eco-conditions through the entire 60+ year history of the global 'environmental movement' and 30 years of increasingly strident 'sustainable development' rhetoric.  It seems that the really necessary changes are unlikely to be forthcoming -- the really important things that could be done are unlikely to be done -- if they require real change.  To put it another way, the solution cannot be found from within the sociopolitical narrative that created the problem. 

The status quo (aka 'business-as-usual), almost by definition, has a life of its own. 

Cheers and stay well,

Bill

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From: Valentina Aversano-Dearborn <vale...@forum-via.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 6, 2020 7:36:41 AM
To: Rees, William
Cc: a.rosp...@brighton.ac.uk; ash...@rizomafieldschool.com; SCORAI; kden...@gmail.com
Subject: Re: [SCORAI] The clothesline challenge vs. the population challenge

 

The discussion about individual eco-gestures -  like hanging clothes instead of using a dryer - reminds me of an interesting study from a few years ago that - back then- sparked an important debate thanks to it's powerful visualization that ranked individual actions for their effectiveness in combating climate change. Here it is: http://www.kimnicholas.com/uploads/2/5/7/6/25766487/fig1full.jpg

[Ashley Colby]

This goes back to a tired debate on this forum, but one I will continue to engage in. The suggestion from Valentina here is we need better information in textbooks, and that will lead to the widespread change we were looking for. My suggestion in the clothesline challenge is not about this one action. Instead, is summed up in one of the last questions I asked to the reader:

Did any of your lessons bleed into some non-clothesline aspect of your life? 

I suggest that it is not really access to good information (textbooks) that stops us from seeing widespread change. We have plenty of information and more and more people agree about the urgency of environmental problems. What we lack are the skills and lived experience of different ways of doing things. That is, when you start to hang clothes you might gain confidence in your ability to do things without ''modern conveniences." This changed behavior might (as it did in my forthcoming book) draw you to other luddites (said tongue-in-cheek) who give you ideas of the different ways they are doing things, which you then try out yourself. Of course, I would imagine an adolescent would have a completely different reaction to the potential of line drying actually seeing their parents doing it (or being made to do it themselves) rather than reading about line drying in a textbook.

To then bring it to Bill's excellent response, people who engage in these kinds of activities (when added together and scaled up into community) become powerful political actors. I've often seen the call for individual action change dismissed as 'not enough.' Of course it's not enough! But does that mean we throw it out entirely? What kind of strategy would that be? There is room for both/and here. We can both change textbooks/raise awareness and change behaviors and change policy and reinvent social structures.

Thanks everyone for your thoughts!!

Ashley

Ashley Colby Fitzgerald

ash...@rizomafieldschool.com

PhD, Environmental Sociology

Co-founder Rizoma Field School

Colonia, Uruguay

[Tom Walker]

One collateral benefit of this is that it will restore the visual image on which the "clothesline" metaphor is based. 

Cheers,

Tom Walker (Sandwichman)

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[Tom Bowerman]

Thank you Ashley for reminding us of the risk of falling for false choices. Again, it is both individual action AND policy oriented collective action. As individuals we can adopt both the shallow (recycling) and the deep (not flying, living car-free, or limiting family size), and work on designing and advocating for public policy (pricing environmental impact externalities).  Voting for competent legislators is a particularly critical individual action at this moment in time.

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[JOHN DE GRAAF,* JOHN DE GRAAF]

Amen, Tom Bowerman, and for us in the US there has never been an election as important as this one.

John de Graaf

www.johndegraaf.com

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[Tadhg O'Mahony]

I laughed when I read your contribution Ashley! But I think you point to a crucial issue here, and this is also alluded to in other posts. It is not the 'agency' of individual action or the 'structure' of collective social action, and institutional and political change, that deliver sustainability, it is all-of-the-above.

This necessity for systems thinking is consistent with the conclusions in sustainability science, including those you will find in the IPCC AR5 WGIII report. The problem with the information-deficit model, for individual behaviour change, is that it has been too successful as the dominant lens. It will still be needed, and the long-term process of values change and identity are important, but in many systems it is the thin-end-of-the wedge and dominates at the expense of other potentially more substantial solutions.

Bill's note on transport is one such example, I can't take a mass transit if it doens't exist. I am much less unlikely to use a bicycle if infrastructure is lacking and a sense of safety cannot be provided due to the hegemony of the private automobile. There are deep epistemological and political issues at play, not least methodological individualism and neoliberal atomisation. But a pragmatic approach can be applied that uses systems thinking to integrate structure-agency in response.

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[Richard Rosen]

Note that clothes lines do not have to be out-of-doors and thus disrupt people's sense of aesthetics.  Most people in Europe simply dry their clothes on a rack inside their houses or apartments.  --- Rich Rosen

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